Chapter 1

"I want to go home." The voice may have been young, but there was nothing childish about it. The girl looked up through an unruly tangle of coppery curls at the forbidding woman, who stared right back. She was dark: hair, eyes, soul. The child's dark blue eyes weighed her, measured her and found her wanting. The child's face turned towards the wall.

"This is your home now. You might as well get the tears over with, Jane."

"My name is Mary Celeste St. Patrick."

"Not anymore, Jane." The door closed behind the woman with a sharp, final click, leaving the child sitting on the narrow bed, staring at the muted grey walls. The battered cardboard box clutched to her chest trembled with every breath she took. Carefully, she untied the frayed string holding the lid onto the base and set it aside. Tiny treasures, useless junk. A faded pink rose, pilfered from someones garden, a handful of brightly colored glass marbles. The well-worn New Testament in the cheap leatherette binding, a child's thin book of prayers. Her fingers traced over the neatly printed letters of her name on the flyleaf. Mary Celeste St. Patrick, on her christening.

This was her whole world. The church and a child's view of the world around her, wide and sparkling with beauty. She didn't understand all of the whys and hows of where she was now, all she knew was that her world had changed. She replaced the lid and tied the string tightly, knotting it with a child's feverish, clumsy intensity.

Someplace safe. Someplace that they'll never find it. She closed her eyes and made a wish, a prayer against the coming dark. Something inside her broke loose, something that burned and choked, and her little fingers closed on empty air. Her eyes opened, wide and clear, brimming with tears of gratitude.

"Hail Mary, full of grace..." She whispered the words as the darkness opened wide, grinning jaws and swallowed her down.

A child's sense of time is fluid. Days melt into months, into years, without an impression on the soul. The body grew and changed, the mind unfolded in frightening, fractured facets of terrible beauty. A child's games became complex puzzles, puzzles into responsibilities, responsibility into tedium. All things have their limit, even the most exotic and unpredictable of rare flowers.

"Nothing touches her," the dark woman said, watching teacups twirl through a complicated dance in midair, even as the girl-- almost on the brink of adolescence, now-- bent studiously over a notebook, pencil moving easily across the page. "Nothing we say, or do, makes the slightest bit of difference to her. She completes her tasks because she wants to be left alone. She doesn't cry, she doesn't laugh, she doesn't smile. It's like she's empty, waiting for something to come and fill her up."

"Is she progressing?" The man next to her, dapper in stripes and gold braid, watched their prodigy with dispassionate eyes, the way he would inspect a tank prototype.

"Yes, in some areas. Her psychokinetic control over physical objects is impressive, regardless of the weight, but as to the other areas of interest... well, we'll see."

"I certainly hope so," he replied, and turned on his heel. She stood watching through the mirrored glass for a long while. The teacups never faltered.

The girl's mind was a deep pool, still and reflecting. Underneath that blank surface everything she was moved, shifting in quick, silver flashes and slow black rolls. The daily demands, ever more taxing, ever more impossible, were mere ripples across the hidden depths of her personality. She moved a kitten from one room to another, brought it back to her hands. She fell asleep with the confused bundle of warm, frizzy feline in her lap, her fingers gently coaxing the fear away from the flattened ears. It was the first cat she had seen in ten years. When she searched for it, after she woke up from the coma-like sleep that lasted for four hours, she found the dissected corpse in the lab, still warm.